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Monday, May 16, 2011

The Trip West: Day 2

Today we took a small rest from our break-neck pace to enjoy the wild beauty of Arizona. The seemingly endless vistas reminded me of a somewhat recent article from Transpositions titled "Natural Beauty, Frontiers, and God" by L. Clifton Edwards:

Despite all of humankind’s progress, we have never lost our desire to dwell in the ever elusive frontiers of beauty and knowledge. And for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the entire sensible and knowable world is a ‘frontier,’ a ‘horizon,’ that catches us up and includes us within its own being and purpose.

Perhaps it is with good reason, then, that Augustine called creation ‘divine art.’ In theConfessions, Augustine also said that he posed his questions to the world in the form of his attention. The response that he received from the world was its beauty. If nature can speak in such a way, then Wordsworth was right to view it, as he said he did, with ‘pregnant vision.’ Does natural beauty speak to us symbolically of the divine, through images of beautiful order, repose, and boundlessness? Do our natural frontiers speak to our spiritual destinations? What if the experience of the poets, and our own experience of the world, whispers rumours of God and a human destination revealed in the naturally beautiful?